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Sep 27

QuickBooks 2011 for the Mac goes on sale

QuickBooks 2011 for the Mac is now on sale from Intuit (http://www.intuit.com). The latest version of the financial software is available Sept. 28 at a suggested retail price of US$229.95 for a single user license.

QuickBooks 2011 for Mac features new reports and tools to help users track job-related mileage so they can claim the tax write-offs they deserve. Users can also customize reports and forms to reflect their brands and to show the exact data they need to show, says Dan Wernikoff, vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division.

He adds that two new features ensure that QuickBooks 2011 for Mac can grow as a small business expands:

° Multi-User Access allows up to five employees to simultaneously view and edit QuickBooks data files.

° User Permissions lets small businesses determine who can work in up to eight accounting activity areas. In...

According to the folks at hsc, parsing Microsoft Outlook Structured Storage .MSG files can be a challenge, even in a Windows development environment. The Outlookk Message Parser plug-in enables REAL Studio developers to easily parse Microsoft Outlook Structured Storage .MSG files cross-platform from the REAL Studio development environment.

Jumsoft (http://www.jumsoft.com) has released new themes for iWeb, the web site creation component of Apple's iLife suite. The new set offers 20 design themes suitable for multiple types of web sites, including 11 addition.

The new iWeb themes collection contains nine reworked themes from previous releases, and 11 new ones. The refreshed classic themes include Magic Sound, Sail Away, and Paradise (now called Bold Shapes). The new designs range from slick Comfort Zone to '70s inspired Stereo 77 to the healthcare-related Supreme Care. The set also includes a number of business-oriented themes with more subtle styling, such as Basic Info and Silver Shadow.

This month marks the end of September, but the month -- and summer -- goes out with a bang in this week's "The MUG Event Calendar."

Andy Ihnatko of the "Chicago Sun-Times" and "MacNotables" will be the very special featured speaker at a New Jersey Group, Apple Senior Systems Engineer Dave Marra will present to a Pennsylvania group, and members of The Apple Store Staff will show off some cool products to a Florida group.

In February, there was some speculation about Microsoft having a very good chance at landing a deal with Apple to make Bing become its default search engine for the iPhone. However, Google will apparently remain the default search engine for now.

China Unicom had taken over 200,000 iPhone 4 pre-orders by early Saturday, the day sales started, and over 40,000 buyers received the phone and a bundled mobile service plan that day, the company said in a statement. For comparison, China Unicom sold 100,000 iPhone handsets in roughly six weeks last year after launching the devices in late October.

Apple has released iTunes 10.0.1. You can obtain it via the Software Updates component of Mac OS X's Systems Preferences app.

The update adds a Ping sidebar in which you can "Like" or "Post" about music from your iTunes library. Plus, you can see the recent Ping activity of a selected artist in your library, or of all artists and friends you follow on Ping. iTunes 10.0.1 also fixes several bugs; namely it:

° Addresses an issue where the picture quality of a video changes depending on whether the on-screen controls are visible;

° Resolves an issue where iTunes may unexpectedly quit while interacting with album artwork viewed in a separate window;

° Fixes a problem that affects the performance of some third-party visualizers;

° Addresses an issue where the iTunes library and playlists appear empty;

° Resolves an issue that created an incompatibility with some third-party shared libraries.

Intel, Adobe, Walt Disney-Pixar and Intuit are also in the talks that would halt agreements under which companies refrained from placing “cold calls” to lure workers, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing the proposal, the article adds. Such unsolicited calls had proved to be successful recruiting tools, one of the people said.

The agreement, which may be completed and announced as early as today (Friday), would...

Toon Boom Studio (http://www.toonboom.com) has released Toon Boom Studio 6, a new version of its 2D animation software that adds bone rigging features. As a bonus, Toon Boom Studio 6 comes with several bone-ready templates that users will be able to incorporate into their own projects.

Valued at US$29.99, this template pack speeds up the animation creation process. In addition, Studio 6 includes a 62 minute How To Video that covers step by step instructions on how to create bone animation. This How To Video is offered for a limited time only to all Studio 6 customers and is valued at $59.99.

You can buy Toon Boom Studio 6 now at the special pre-launch price of $279.99instead of $329.99, valid until Sept. 30. Upgrades from version 4.5 and 5 to version 6 can be purchased at $99.99.

BookLover, developed by Electric Pocket, is a new iPhone app for book lovers who not only are always on the lookout for good books, but eagerly share with friends after they’ve read a great one. They simply input the title and author (if known) and BookLover goes online to retrieve the cover art and any other information available. It's available at an introductory rate of US$0.99.

IMAK Creations has announced Who Is The Smartest? (WITS) Vocabulary for iPhone and iPod touch users. Fall 2010 marks the beginning of the college and graduate school admissions season with the taking of ACT, SAT, and GRE tests. Now students have a US$2.99 tool in learning advanced vocabulary words. Who Is The Smartest? (WITS) Vocabulary integrates with Apple's new...

KavaSoft has released HyperImage 3.5 (http://www.kavasoft.com/HyperImage/), an update of the US$25 Mac OS X app that lets you download images from web sites. It's now a full featured Tumblr client.

Tumblr is a community for blogging and reblogging photos. HyperImage helps you do everything you can do on the Tumblr web site. Just enter the address of a Tumblr blog, and HyperImage will download all of the photos

HyperImage includes a built-in image browser. You can skip over unwanted images and choose which links to follow. With HyperImage you can also include or exclude images with certain names and choose which image formats to download.

HyperImage is available for US$25. You can try it for free, and images downloaded with an unlicensed copy will contain a watermark. HyperImage requires Mac OS X 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") and is 64-bit optimized.

“We are thrilled to bring iPhone 4 to our customers,” said DiGi head of marketing, Albern Murty. “Malaysians are fast becoming regular users of mobile Internet, and now with iPhone 4, we expect to see a strong upward trend as customers enjoy the features of the new iPhone."

Quanta is expected to ship a total of 13-13.2 million notebooks in the third quarter, says "DigiTimes." That's down 3-5% from 13.7 million units shipped in the second quarter. The company shipped 3.6 million notebooks in July and 4.4 million units in August.

On the new MacVoices ("MacVoices"), Michael Cohen, the author of the brand new "Take Control of PDF Pen 5" book, starts out by reviewing the history of the PDF, a file format most Mac users encounter every day, but may not fully understand.

He explains how and why it was developed, why not all PDFs are created equal, and some things you can't natively do with them. PDFpen 5 from Smile solves those problems, and Cohen takes us on a tour.

"MacVoices" is an Internet show and podcast that delivers in-depth discussions with the most influential people in the Mac industry, as well as "the individuals who are out there making it happen on the front lines of the global Apple community," according to host Chuck Joiner.

Macgamestore.com has begun taking pre-orders for UbiSoft's Assassin’s Creed 2 Deluxe Edition (http://www.macgamestore.com/detail.php?ProductID=1612) for the Macintosh. The game, which is scheduled to be available on Oct. 4,, is available for pre-order as a digital download for 34.99. It requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.

Assassin’s Creed 2 Digital Deluxe Edition includes Assassins Creed 2 and three bonus maps. You can explore some of the Renaissance’s most prestigious monuments to reveal secret treasures in three special in-game maps: Palazzo Medici, Santa Maria Dei Frari, and the Arsenal Shipyard.

Here's how the game is described: "Assassin’s Creed 2 is the follow-up to the title that became the fastest-selling new IP in video game history. The highly anticipated title features a new hero, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young Italian noble,...

Our next Category Review will look at account management software for the Mac. If you use or know of such goodies, drop me a line (dsellers@applecentral.com) no later than Wednesday, Sept. 29.

Migration Kits appear on Friday and round-up Mac solutions for specific industries and areas as dentistry, engineering, sales, etc. Also, if you have a particular migration topic you'd like us to cover, drop me a line, as well.

Clarkwood Software's (http://clarkwood.com) Multisite for iWeb 2.0, a Mac OS X utility for users of iWeb, has been updated to version 2.5.3. iWeb is part of Apple's iLife suite of software.

Apple built iWeb to manage a site going to a single server. If you need to build several sites that go to more than a single web server then Multisite solves your dilemma, according to the folks at Clarkwood Software. It also speeds up iWeb’s publishing by putting sites into individual files behind the scenes so you don't have to publish every site each time.

Multisite 2.5.3 provides better feedback for cases where iWeb was renamed. In cases where a folder isn't created it now displays the path. Version 2.5.3 also improves: internal counts when tracking number of sites; permission checking in the file system; licensing feedback; and the automated build process for better version number coordination.

St. Clair Software has released App Tamer 1.0.1 (http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/), an update of the app for Mac OS X 10.5 and higher that gives you control over your applications so you can save battery and CPU power.The new version increases efficiency and addresses several issues that have been reported since version 1.0 was released.

Some Mac applications, especially web browsers, continue running tasks or animations even when they're supposed to be idle in the background. This can consume valuable processing power and reduce battery life. App Tamer's AutoStop capability automatically pauses these applications when you switch away from them, and then restarts them when you click back to them. This frees your CPU and reduces power consumption, according to the folks at St. Clair.

App Tamer shows the average percentage of your processor(s) being used by each app, and...

The Escapers has released Flux 3.1 (http://theescapers.com/flux2/), an update of the Mac OS X app that allows drag 'n drop creation of web pages without the need of knowledge of XHTMLICSS (though you can twiddle with the code if you like). The upgrade introduces a new History feature to allow reversing experimental changes or mistakes.

Snapshots can be easily created using a keyboard shortcut. Also, a new palette manages the complete history of your web page.

Users of both Flux 1 & 2 are entitled to an upgrade for £34.99, and new users can pay only £69.99 for a single user license, or £99.99 for a family license.

BookLover, the US$0.99 iPhone app for those who love reading and sharing information on their favorite books with friends, now offers a barcode scanning feature to make it easier to enter books into the app. Once entered, BookLover automatically fetches the book cover and, in many cases, a synopsis of each book in the reader's collection or on their Wish List.

Electric Pocket has announced Nag - One Tap Alarm 1.0 for iOS devices. The free app offers a way to give yourself a persistent reminder that something needs to be done. Nag offers a control screen for setting a quick reminder for yourself.

KadaMedia has released HourClash 1.0, a $0.99 game for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices. It features physics based gameplay, soundtracks and 15...

“There’s no reason at all Apple can’t grow much, much bigger,” Jane Snorek, an analyst with Minneapolis-based First American Funds (which has more than $100 billion under management, with Apple as its largest technology holding) told "Bloomberg." Apple still has a small portion of the market for phones and...

Bandai Namco has released Pac-Man Championship Edition DX on iOS and Android, which features the classic arcade gameplay that we've all grown to love.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX can be enjoyed in much shorter bursts than the arcade versions but the gameplay remains intact. [Read more]
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Angel Stone is Fincon's follow up to the massively successful Hello Hero and is out now on iOS and Android.
You play as a member of The Resistance, a group of mighty human warriors who have risen up in defiance of the Demon horde threatening to wipe out humanity. [Read more]
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The not exactly rumors were true and the birds are back. Angry Birds 2 has come to the App Store and the world will... well I suppose it'll still be the same, but now we have more bird-flinging options!
[Read more]
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You Could Design Your Own Card for Chain...

If you've ever wanted to create your own item, weapon, trap, or even monster for Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night, this is your chance. Auroch Digital is currently holding a contest so that fans can fight to the death (not really) to see which design will make the cut (no pun intended).
[Read more]
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Bitcoin Billionaire is Going Back in Tim...

If you thought you managed to buy everything there is to buy in Bitcoin Billionaire and make all the money, well you though wrong. Those of you who made it far enough might remember investing in time travel - and it looks like that investment is finally going to accomplish something.
[Read more]
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Domino Drop (Games)

Domino Drop 1.0
Device: iOS Universal
Category: Games
Price: $1.99, Version: 1.0 (iTunes)
Description:
Domino Drop is a delightful new puzzle game with dominos and gravity!Learn how to play it in a minute, master it day by day.Your mind will be challenged.Your soul will be calmed.Features:- 3 unique game modes- 12 pleasant music... | Read more »

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